Notes on ADASS XX

References

• Oral Presentations
• Posters

Impressions

• Nothing on telescope scheduling this year.
• GPUs and handling big databases seem to be the zeitgeist
• Python taken for granted, IDL ignored
• Generating big data and handling big data once it is in a database were hot topics, but nothing on looking at big data as it is collected.
• Only competitor (that is not a competitor: data collection vs archiving) to FITS seems to be HDF5, seems embryonic from the BOF.

Notes

• Massively Parallel Fourier-Space Cross-Correlation for Analyzing Highly Dimensional Time Series Databases was kind of real-time, but still searching a database.
• Pig as a Solution for Accessing Peta-scale Astronomical Datasets claimed easier to use than SQL
• Amdahl's Laws and Extreme Data Intensive Computing (invited) was informative and I noted he kept a small swarm of attendees around him for most the conference.
  • data growth hitting limits except for radio astronomy
  • software is the next instrument, i.e., simulations and value-added-data are producing huge amounts of data
• Section on making pretty-pictures for public outreach, e.g., Data to Pictures to Data: Outreach Imaging Software and Metadata
• Open Access in High-Energy Physics described how researchers share data in high-energy physics as a model for astronomers.
• Great one-hour commercial from Mr. Mathematica (Stephen Wolfram) see similar presentation at demo.
• What Python can do for Astronomy (invited) talked about the python community and its ability to generate good tools, asked the question if such cooperation could be developed in the astronomical world. (Bad-mouthed FITS and was not lynched!)
• What Observers Really Want (invited) had the typical users' whine about why are there so many software systems and so hard to use; nothing new but seems to be a required talk.
• There was a pretty good user-interface (operators, not observers) talk though from ALMA: Goodbye to WIMPs: A Scalable Interface for ALMA Operations

Talks which might be of interest to us

• Massively Parallel Fourier-Space Cross-Correlation for Analyzing Highly Dimensional Time Series Databases pulsar searching?
• The Gemini Recipe System: a dynamic workflow for automated data reduction if applicable to near real-time display

Our posters (for posterity)

• A Data Analysis and Mapping Pipeline for the Green Bank Telescope
• The GBT Dynamic Scheduling System: An Update